Sunday, February 21, 2010

I have a weakness for the IPAs found here in the north west. The almost overwhelming abundance of hop flavor and aroma, backed up by full bodied malty goodness just can't be beat. I wanted to make something similar to that, but with a slightly toned down version. The 100IBU beers are great, but I wanted something that wouldn't wreck the palate after drinking (this is a fairly novel concept here in the NW). The new Citra hops are now readily available, so decided to use them in this beer. This beer was brewed on 1-16-2010, racked into the secondary on the 23rd, dry hoped on the 30th and kegged on 2-6.

I originally planned on dry hoping this beer with 1 oz of citra hops. I tasted the beer when racking it into the secondary and the grapefruit flavors were almost overwhelming. I decided to cut the citra in half and add a half oz of some home grown nuggets that a friend had given me. I think this was the right call. If I would have used a different flavoring hop I don't think the citra would have been overwhelming, but since I did, the nuggets in the dry hop turned out really nice.

The beer came out with a strong grapefruit and floral hop aroma, citrus flavor and a nice strong bitterness to back it up. The after taste lingers, but will not kill the palate. This makes it enjoyable to drink with any meal, or even to follow it up with a different kind of beer. The body of the beer is full, but again not overwhelming. Like I said before I have a weakness for the big bodied beers, so I might step on the grains a little more next time to bring the body and alcohol content up.

On a side note, I've only been getting about 65% efficiencies with my system. During this batch I had found that my thermometer was off by about 8 degrees in the 150 degree range. This was a turkey frier style thermometer that was marketed for home brewing. I changed back over to the glass thermometer on my next batch. I've always just gone off of a mash time as well instead of look for the conversion to complete. On my next batch, I'm going to be getting some iodophor to check for complete conversions.

As always, feel free to use the recipe, or modify for your own tastes. Happy home brewing!